Fire undermines leader’s safety vow
SEOUL, South Korea — When President Moon Jae-in took power in South Korea last May, he vowed to make his disaster-prone country a safer place to live. But public skepticism over his ability to deliver has deepened with a string of tragedies in recent weeks, including a hospital fire that killed dozens of people Friday.
The fire that engulfed Sejong Hospital in the southern city of Miryang was the deadliest fire in South Korea in a decade. It also came barely a month after another fire killed 29 people in December.
Both accidents revealed deep flaws in the country’s safety standards, like the lack of fire sprinklers in the hospital, problems that are likely to further erode public confidence in Moon’s ability to deliver his campaign promises just as the country prepares to host the Winter Olympics.
In Friday’s fire, the government even had trouble delivering an authoritative death toll, a common problem in South Korean disasters. The local police, fire department and health authorities announced 41 had died, but later revised that number to 37, saying some bodies were counted twice. But they said the death toll could rise again because more than 100 people had been injured, 10 of them seriously.
On Friday, officials were still investigating the cause of the fire, which they said started on the hospital’s first floor. Toxic smoke quickly spread through the rest of the hospital, which was filled with older patients, many of them unable to move on their own when the fire broke out, they said. Twenty-six of the 37 dead were in their 80s or 90s, including a 99-year-old woman. All of the fatalities apparently died of inhaling the smoke, police detective Kim Han-soo told reporters.
Like other rural towns in South Korea, Miryang has seen its population rapidly age in recent decades as its young have abandoned farming and migrated to cities.
Miryang residents who have used the hospital reported that its intensive care unit was typically overcrowded with aging patients. South Korea’s rich prefer big university hospitals in major cities that attract patients with modern equipment, while smaller provincial clinics are often poorly staffed and equipped and often squeeze as many beds in as possible to remain financially viable.
The Miryang hospital even lacked fire sprinklers, said Choi Man-woo, chief of the local fire department. He said many of the victims were believed to have died from inhaling smoke. The dead included a doctor and two nurses, Choi said.
“Many of the patients could not move on their own and were ones who had difficulties breathing,” Choi said, adding that six of the people who died were found in an elevator. “The hospital was not protected from a fire.”
While tackling the blaze at the hospital’s five-story main building, where all the deaths occurred, firefighters also had to evacuate patients from an annex that operated as a nursing home, carrying some of the patients on their backs because few of them were able to walk.
“That I covered myself with a wet towel and thick blankets was all I remember,” Lee Oksoon, 78, a Sejong Hospital patient, told the national news agency Yonhap after she regained consciousness in another hospital.
Ha Yong-gyu, 89, was hospitalized on the fifth floor with a cold when the fire erupted. “I was coming out of the restroom when I saw the thick smoke in the hallway and heard people shouting for help,” Ha told Yonhap.
With its death toll, the Miryang accident was the most deadly fire since an inferno engulfing a cold storage warehouse killed 40 people in 2008, including 13 ethnic Korean workers from China who migrated to their ancient homeland for better pay. In 2003, 192 people died in a subway arson.